The resurrection challenges our right to despair. Despair is something we misunderstand, just as we misunderstand resurrection. Both are not experiences which are extraordinary, at the end of life. Resurrection and despair lie in the bread and butter of our existence.

Generally we tend to confuse despair with the type of illness which leads to suicide or pathological withdrawal. This is not despair. It is merely an illness, like heart disease, cancer or high blood pressure. We have confused despair with suicide partly because, for years, the church did. It declared that despair was an unforgivable sin and then, most often, went on to identify despair with suicide. At times, it even refused to give a Christian burial to suicide victims. Fortunately those days are past. We have little to fear about guilt and salvation when a suicide occurs.

The Church’s declaration that despair is unforgivable has, I submit, nothing whatever to do with those souls, often of extraordinary sensitivity and goodness, who were unable to survive the emotional and psychological napalm in our world. In their deaths there is, generally, no more guilt, sin, or freedom involved than there is in the death of a cancer or heart attack victim. In each case, the person dies against his or her own choice, unfree and unable to continue to live.  Real despair, like all of the worst demons, is infinitely more subtle. What is it? It is the death of our sense of surprise, the belief that nothing new can happen to us. We despair at that precise moment when, consciously or unconsciously, we say in resignation: “That is the way I am, that is the way things have always been for me, that is the way it will always be! I know what is possible! For me it is too late!” Once this has been said, we are in a tomb. Much of us is dead and more of us is still dying.

Why is this despair? Why is it so dangerous? Because the resurrection is always, like it was the first time, a surprise, the totally unexpected, the impossible, that which defies all logic, the laws of nature, and the wisdom of common sense and convention. The resurrection is the fairy tale of the child come true. But when we stop believing in fairy tale endings, when we have every angle of reality so calculated and figured that we know all the possibilities, then nothing new can come along to surprise us. Sadly, our prophecy will then be self-fulfilling for it is always our own desire to be defeated that, in the end, defeats us! Nothing new can happen! We have ceased believing in God and grace in a real sense. Our God is the God of the impossible and for us too much is not possible. We have slimmed down God and grace to fit our own minds. That is despair. We must let the resurrection of Christ challenge our despair: We go through life perpetually dissatisfied, both with life and with ourselves. We live not merely in exile, but also in mediocrity.

Our world is not full of mediocre persons. It is full, rather, of extraordinarily gifted persons, living in mediocrity…and in a subsequent frustration. And we are frustrated at all levels. Spiritually, we know we are lackluster. We pray seldom and poorly. We know we should, and could, make more effort, but we feel helpless against longstanding habits of laziness, dissipation and distraction. Our good intentions, over so many years, have never really carried through. Now we have despaired that we will ever be better. Interpersonally, it is much the same story: we are frustrated and mediocre. Entombed in longstanding habits of resentment and infidelity, shame and inhibition, we are prevented from being fully loving and in warm satisfying friendships with others. Finally, we are also frustrated creatively: We have insides bursting with creative juices, richness of all kinds, but we are going nowhere! We are all talented-up with no place to go! We are in deep tombs, behind a wall of very large stone. Our exile will not be ended easily. Worst of all, in the end, we have given up hope. We have precisely said: “I’ve tried, but it didn’t work! That is the way I am and that is the way I will always be. It is too late for me now! That is despair and we, knowing life as well as we do, will protest that we are entitled to it. After all we know what is possible! But do we? The disciples of Christ thought they did. When their dream seemed to die they went back to fishing, finished with their disappointing little experiment with the dreamer. Then came that Sunday when the stone rolled back and they were surprised. They quit fishing for good after that! We spend our lives between fishing and dreaming, despair and resurrection. Every so often it happens and we are surprised: The stone rolls back for awhile and we poke out our timid heads, take off the linen bindings they wrap the dead in, and walk free for a time, breathe resurrection air… And we have a glorious 40 days with the resurrected Christ…the smell of fresh fish seems to be everywhere; empty nets, suddenly, full to the breaking point; strangers we’ve walked with for years, surprisingly, turn out to be Christ in disguise; the Scriptures begin to burn holes in us; and a powerful spirit, suddenly, has us speaking in a whole different language.

If only we could quit fishing for good!

Woody Allen once proposed a set of courses for a university curriculum.  Among others, he proposed these:  An Introduction to Hostility; Intermediate Hostility; Advanced Hatred and Theoretical Foundations of Loathing. The common understanding is that hatred is the opposite of love; that it is always bad.  Christians and mature persons don’t hate!  That is a very unfortunate and potentially dangerous misunderstanding. Indifference, not hatred, is the opposite of love.  You can only hate someone you love and the deeper the love, the deeper the hatred.

Hatred is not the opposite of love, it is merely frustrated love, grieving love, wounded love, longing love, unrequited love, hopeless love, raped love; in a word, imperfect love.  As such it is not necessarily a bad thing, something that a good Christian or a mature person never does. Hatred is to unrequited love what grief is to death or separation.  For this reason it is a vital and necessary emotion within us. As Christians we are taught that we must never hate.  This, I submit, is too simple. More and more we are becoming sensitive to the importance of grieving when we lose a loved one through death.  If, upon the death of a loved one, we bury our anger, rage, disappointment and depression, we end up wounding ourselves at a much deeper level. Hurt calls for tears and anger.  Suppressing our feelings is like putting our garbage into the basement and closing the door.  It is out of sight and out of mind for a while, but it soon seeps through the vents and permeates the entire house.

When we suffer loss we must rage and anger and cry, otherwise our suppressed grief will seep in through the vents and pollute our entire emotional and psychological atmosphere. I believe that the old Irish-type wake, with all its weeping, boozing and lamenting, was infinitely more therapeutic and healthy than is the sterile, passionless, plastic and inhuman wake of today which denies death and feeling. After a death we must rage and grieve.  For a time.  But we are incredibly resilient beings and, after a time, we must let go and move out with new hope and new resources to create new life.  Life is for loving, but you cannot always live without deep griefs. Likewise we cannot always live with hating.  When, in friendship and love, we lose a person (not through physical death, but through an emotional and psychological death) we need, I submit, to hate; to hate with the strength and depth of our love for the person we have lost.

Hatred is love’s grief!  This is neither bad nor unhealthy unless it becomes aggressive or unfair or is prolonged for too long a time. Like grief, hatred is necessary for a while.  But, like grief too, there comes a moment when it is time to say:  “That’s enough!”  There comes a time when one must let go, rebuild.  There comes a time when nothing further is to be gained psychologically, emotionally and spiritually by grieving. Then, like King David upon the death of his illegitimate son, we must say:  “While the child was still alive I prayed and fasted, hoping that God might save him.  Now he is dead!  Nothing further is to be gained.  It is time to begin to live again.” Then, like David, who went immediately and bathed, anointed his head with oil, ate a meal and slept with his wife who then conceived Solomon, we too must move out to create new life, beyond our hurt.  The new life will turn the hatred back into its proper perspective, warm love.  Keep passing the open windows! Love has many faces, some warm and some cold.  At times it writes poems like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, “How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.”

At other times it writes:  “How do I hate thee?  Let me count the ways… I hate thee freely… I hate thee purely… I hate thee with passion put to use… I hate thee with a love I seemed to lose.” It is no accident that so many persons involved in liberation movements go through periods of intense hatred.  Women hate men, poor hate rich.  When love is not possible, hatred steps into the breech. This is far from ideal, but it beats the alternative, resignation, hopelessness and indifference. We are pilgrims, exiles, living in Christ’s unconsummated body, a long ways from home.  Scandalous as this may sound, we need to hate at times, providing that we realize always that, in the end, we are loving and we will love. The final sin against the Holy Spirit, against love, is never hatred, nor even the despair of the overtired and the wounded… but indifference, the subtle unforgivable despair of the strong, the lie of self-sufficiency.

In the past few years I have done a lot of reading and reflecting on the question of women’s issues.I have read a sampling of the literature both good and bad. With just a few exceptions, I have been disappointed and depressed with the views that the authors have presented. My disappointment comes not because I disagree with the issue and its importance. I could not agree more. The issue of relationship between male and female is, singularly, the most important and vital issue in the world. Other problems are merely a consequence of bad relationships within this area. We, all of us, female and male, make war, seek power, exploit others, rape, and are frustrated because we are unwhole in our sexuality in this wide sense. The rest follows from the unwholeness. Whole persons, saints, don’t make war, seek power, exploit or rape.

My disappointment and frustration with the current discussion on women’s issues comes not because I (male) think that they (female) are pushing the issue too far. The reverse. I feel that they are not pushing it far enough, not nearly far enough. For this reason, I submit that much (perhaps most) of the discussion tends to be narrow, self-pitying, superficial and, worst of all, counterproductive to spawning healthier female-male relationships. Why? Because too many persons (writing in the name of women) would have us believe that male dominance, male insensitivity and male lack of sexual integration is the sole root of the issue. That is a dangerous half-truth. Female sexual ambivalence is, I submit, as equally at the root of the problem because it helps spawn and nurture male dominance and insensitivity. Ultimately, though, the root is deeper still.

The real core of the issue lies not between us as male and female…but within us, in unresolved androgynous conflict, in the conflict between male and female (“animus” and “anima,” in the Jungian sense) within each of us. Sigmund Freud, for all his genius, contended that the state which we call normal is really neurotic. He held that this universal neurosis was caused by unresolved sexual instincts. We are all so hopelessly sexed that, outside of ourselves, there is no possibility of fulfilling these impulses. Carl Jung agrees with Freud about the pathology of the state we call normal, but he gives a different reason for it. For Jung, we are neurotic because we have not resolved the male-female tension inside of us. Jung, I feel, is closer to the truth. 

Why do men act the way they do? Why our propensity for the macho-complex? Because that is where the payoff is…with women. Men act that way because something inside of women wants them to act that way. Women would do well to listen to the talk in male locker rooms (as, I suspect, men would do well to listen to the talk in female locker rooms).

The bottom line when most male locker room talk about women is distilled is: “Bed’em down in disrespect or they will never respect you!” That is sick, but the factual truth in it is scary. Why do women act the way they do? Why so much the propensity for playing the role of subservience? Why the tendency to project a peroxided brainless sexuality? Because that is where the payoff lies…with men. Women act that way because something inside of men wants them to act that way. We are both, male and female, disappointed with each other, but we so frequently nurture what is worst in each other. The end result is an ambivalent frustration which, too frequently, spawns hatred…and, ultimately, a certain raping of each other. Why do men rape women? Because women also rape men…in a less physical, though not less sexual, way. Hatred, not lust, is as we know, the root of all rape…and hatred flows back and forth between men and women in a fairly equal way.

We are all incredibly ambivalent within ourselves and we tend to project that ambivalence outside of ourselves. As an example: I just recently re-read Marilyn French’s poignant novel, The Bleeding Heart. I guess, given the chance, I would ask her this question: “Why do you gravitate towards the type of men who do those type of things to you? What is unresolved in you, Marilyn, that makes you fall in love with men who abuse you?” I suspect, unfairly I am sure, that if Marilyn French (or her heroine, Dolores), for all her pleading about male insensitivity, ever met a truly sensitive man she would consider that very sensitivity a lack of genuine masculinity, the vulnerability a weakness and would find herself (perhaps against her own will) emotionally and erotically less attracted to him because she would consider him (to use some masculine terminology) a bit of a wimp! I am deeply sympathetic to the issue of women’s liberation. It is the most important issue of all. However I am in less sympathy with much of the literature it has produced. Too much of it is one-sided, shallow and simply does not pick up on the heart of the issue, namely, the androgynous conflict inside of us and the emotional and sexual ambivalence that this spawns.

Personally, I would recommend Doris Lessing’s, The Golden Notebook. Lessing, perhaps more that anyone else, is able to touch with sympathy and genuine understanding (and without one-sided judgment) the emotional complexities and ambivalences that underlie this issue. As well, I would recommend John Sanford’s, Invisible Partners. Sanford, using Jung, gives an excellent analysis of the psychological dynamics within us which cause so many of our emotional and other schizophrenias. We are all a long ways from home…pilgrims, exiles, all of us. We are longing for a coming together, within and without, of male and female. Lord, may that kingdom come! The issue of male-female relationships is surely the most critical of all issues. Women’s liberation, more that anyone or anything else, has highlighted this.

However, it is time to blow the whistle on those analyses which are self-pitying, unfair and shallow because now they are beginning to spread more hatred than love. Love follows from truth.

Love, intimacy, friendship, sexuality. These are surely the most important words of our age, as, indeed, they should be, in any age. However, they stand as realities whose mysteries we have scarcely penetrated. At best, we are the edges of them, struggling to touch the hem of their garments. Much can be learned about their reality; however, by examining the parallels that exist between how we interrelate as people and how we relate to God. There are surprisingly similar stages of development, which must be undergone in both instances. In reflecting upon prayer and the stages of religious growth, classical spiritual writers are unanimous in asserting a certain pattern of development: Invariably, in the early stages of religious growth, particularly in one’s life of prayer, God provides us with an enjoyable experience. At this stage, we feel good about praying, about being religious and moral, and about our experiences with God in general. This is, as the classical writes of the spiritual life assert, a period of consolation.

Almost invariably, after a period of time, the emotional satisfaction dries up and disappears. Instead of enjoyment we now experience the desert, the “dark night of the soul.” Feelings of emotional satisfaction and intensity give way to feelings of boredom and barrenness: feelings that leave us sweating about our faith, unable to pray properly, wondering about the seeming unreality of it all. Why? What dynamics are operative here? Put simply, at a certain point of our religious growth, God dries up the good feelings in order to free us from the experience itself. We need a certain weaning. God wants us to be in a vital relationship with himself. Religious life is all about being interested in the person of God. It is not primarily about having a good experience! There is a difference! Knowing human nature as he does, God knows that the experience itself can get in the way of persons relating. We tend to get hung up on the experience, on the good feelings, the emotional satisfaction and not on the person of God. The drying up of the experience affords us the opportunity to move beyond the experience to the person. Dark nights of the soul are necessary. They, and they alone, can wean us from a fixation upon experience that prevents us from being interested in what lies behind the experience, namely, the person of God.

This dynamic holds true, and sadly so, in so many of our human relationships. All of us seek love, friendship, intimacy, and sexuality with a craving bordering upon a fetish. But our pursuits invariably leave us feeling dry and barren, fighting boredom. There are many reasons for this. Often our initial search was not sincere, nor honest, but a distorted self-interest which we did not recognize. However, at times, the search is sincere – and yet, ultimately, it culminates in the same feelings of barrenness.

What is happening here? A necessary “dark night of the soul” within love is taking place. Not unlike our relationship with God, within our relationships with each other, we too tend to get too hung up on the experience, making it an end in itself. We pursue love, intimacy and sex, but too seldom do we actually pursue another person.

More often than not we are hung up on the experience of falling in love, of being in love, of being intimate, of having sex. We are not interested enough in the person to whom we are actually relating. We are in love with being in love. That is why so many of our relationships are ultimately so dissatisfying. When all is bared, we are not interested in the other person and they are not interested in us! That is also why we can change partners so easily and frequently. Whenever, within any important relationship, we experience the waning of emotional intensity, when the boredom and the dryness sets in, and we begin to wonder about the unreality of it all, we should see the waning as a weaning. We should too, I submit, spend more time examining ourselves to see whether ultimately we are actually interested in the other person rather than hastily begin to examine new possibilities for friendship and intimacy. Unless we understand this and act upon it, we risk simply repeating a cycle which is, in the final analysis, selfish. We risk as well condemning ourselves to perpetual immaturity. We need to let our “dark nights” within friendship, intimacy and sexuality teach us to become interested in persons – and not just in having good experiences!

In the past several years I have been more than a little hurt when, on more than a few occasions, friends of mine would leave the priesthood, the convent or even the church itself because they felt that they were too full of the zest for life, too sensual, too sexual and generally too human and complicated to live the spiritual life. Most often the complaint sounds something like this: “I can never be a real spiritual person. I am just too restless! I want to live too much! I am too full of life! I feel like Zorba the Greek! I want to experience things more! I am just too unspiritual!” Such an attitude, while extremely common, is extremely dangerous for it is either a grave rationalization or a very serious mistake. It is deadly in either case. When in fact someone in all sincerity believes that they are too full of life and eros, restlessness and complexity, to live the spiritual life they are being sucked in by a viral heresy which would have us believe that eros, the drive for life, is fundamentally irreligious. That is always a serious and costly mistake because eros is the very basis of the spiritual life and everyone, absolutely everyone, must live a spiritual life.

What we do with the eros inside of us, be it heroic or perverse, is our spiritual life. The tragedy is that so many persons, full of riches and bursting with life, see this drive as something that is essentially irreligious, as something that sets them against what is spiritual. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our erotic pulses are God’s lure in us. They are our spirit! We experience them precisely as “spirit,” as that which makes us more than mere mammals.  However, again and again, in my ministry and in my friendships I am confronted with persons who sincerely believe that they are unspiritual when, in fact, they are deeply spiritual persons. Unable to form a vision within which they can integrate their drive for life, celebration and sexuality, into a commitment which includes church-going, Christian sexual morality, prayer and involvement in a Eucharistic community, they are forced into a false dilemma: They must choose between a Christian commitment (which appears as erotic suicide) and a life partially away from Christian community, sacraments, prayer and morality, but within which they feel they can be fully human, sensual, sexual and celebrating. This dilemma, within which the church is seen as a parasite, sucking life’s pulse out of its subjects, then allows society’s amorality to parade itself as being ultimately life-giving and the true defender of eros.

A perfect example of this is seen in Mary Gordon’s poignant novel, Final Payments. Her heroine, Isabelle Moore, is a very bright, talented, deep and frustrated person who has to choose constantly between faith-God-church and her tremendous passion for life, celebration and sexuality. Poor Isabelle can see no room to express her passion within the confines of a religious commitment. So she is forced to abandon her religious practices and all links to church in an effort to find passion and full life in celebrating life and sexuality with her non-Christian friends. Isabelle, like so many of us, misunderstood her passion and drive for life as something essentially non-religious. That forced upon her this illicit dichotomy. Few things are hurting us as badly at present as that misconception because what it does is identify the spiritual life with piety, naïveté, lack of sensuality and sexuality, lack of passion, and lack of interest in, and zest for, life itself. When such an attitude is sincere, as it sometimes is, it still serves to block any deep journey towards the type of love, friendship, sexual integration and Christian commitment that could bring one genuine life. When such an attitude is a rationalization, it also hides the true meaning of our drive for life. However, in this latter case, it is more dangerous since it then becomes an excuse to selfishly pursue pleasure and to refuse to offer a fiat to God and community.

Moreover, whether sincere or insincere, it is too an incredibly arrogant and judgemental stance for it implies that those who do commit themselves to church, sacraments and Christian sexual morality are simple, unsexual, unsensual, and somehow less bright and less interested in life than we are. I submit that this type of attitude, however sincerely adopted, is the most cutting insult that anyone can offer to a person who is committed within the church. Be that as it may! My purpose in writing this is not apologetic. This is a plea: If you are the type of person who, precisely, understand yourself as too complicated, too bursting with eros, too-driven in the pursuit of life, too sensual and too sexual, to be a real spiritual person then don’t, please don’t, see this drive as something irreligious. Nobody is more qualified than you, nor more called, to live the spiritual life. The more erotic you are, the more spiritual you are, but know that only in the building up and in the consummation of Christ’s body will that spirit with all its noble and lusty impulses find peace. Know too that only in the chastity of that body will that sensuality and sexuality spawn lasting bonding and new life.

For reasons too complex to be fully understood, even by themselves, many writers, poets, and artists end up living in countries far distant from their own. English poets have been notorious for migrating to Italy, American painters like living in Paris, and Russian novelists, given the chance, frequently defect to the United States. Commonly too these artists and writers produce lengthy laments as to why they can no longer live in their homelands. Longing and frustrated, desiring greatly to be home, they feel bound by a complex of factors that prevent their returning there. They feel exiled. Sometimes their exile is self-imposed; at other times they sense that the choice has been forced on them. In either case there is, generally, a sense of restless dissatisfaction. I have chosen to call this column (to be a regular feature in the WCR) “In Exile.” Superficially, I have chosen this title because I am now living in Europe, far from much of what I consider as home.

I do not pretend to be a Robert Browning, writing Home-Thoughts, From Abroad, nor a Thomas Wolfe, spinning deep insights out of an exile’s pain, but I do take some amateur’s vicarious delight in the small parallel. For much more significant reasons, I have chosen this title because all of us live our lives in exile. We live our lives seeing (as St. Paul puts it) “as through a glass, darkly.” We live in our separate riddles, partially separated from God, each other, and even from ourselves. We experience some love, some community, some peace, but never these in their fullness. Our senses, egocentricity, and human nature place a veil between us and full love, full community, and full peace. We live, truly, as in a riddle: The God who is omnipresent cannot be sensed; others, who are as real as ourselves, are always partially distanced and unreal; and we are, in the end, fundamentally a mystery even to ourselves.

In that sense we are, all of us, far away from home. We are in exile, longing to understand more fully and to be understood more fully. The asphyxiating ambiguity of the riddle we live in slowly tires us. Daily our hunger for consummation within the body of Christ intensifies. We feel so distanced from so much. We would want to go home! And, while we are on this pilgrimage, our perspectives are only partial; our vision, even at best, is only that of the “foreigner,” one out of the mainstream, who does not fully see nor understand. From this exiled perspective I will offer my reflections. I will try to offer them humbly and honestly. However, given the fact that Adam and Eve too were my first parents, I suspect that, more often than may be justifiably excused, bias may displace honesty, and arrogance may parade itself as humility. For this I apologize in advance. The column itself will take a variety of forms. Margaret Atwood once said: “What touches you is what you touch!” I plan to touch on a whole lot of things, stuff of all kinds.

Mostly I will offer reflections on various theological, church and secular issues. (That about covers everything!) Occasionally, however, prose will give way to poetry and more serious reflection will be replaced by satire. As well (though not often) I will offer a review on some book which I deem particularly excellent. The reflections will not be in any way systematic, though occasionally I will do five or six columns in a series on one particular theme. If there is any one umbrella under which these diverse reflections might find a home, it is precisely their title, “In Exile.” All of them, in their own way, are trying to untangle the riddle, to end the exile, to help get a pilgrim home! In Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot writes: “What we call the beginning is often the end – and to make an end is to make a beginning.”

This, folks, is a beginning!